


Five of Pentacles, Reversed

by liasangria



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, Illustrations, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24899452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liasangria/pseuds/liasangria
Summary: vignettes, in five parts.
Relationships: Aradia Megido/Feferi Peixes, Aradia Megido/Karkat Vantas, Eridan Ampora/Aradia Megido, Eridan Ampora/Feferi Peixes, Eridan Ampora/Karkat Vantas, Eridan Ampora/Sollux Captor, Eridan Ampora/Sollux Captor/Aradia Medigo/Feferi Peixes/Karkat Vantas, Feferi Peixes/Karkat Vantas, Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido, Sollux Captor/Feferi Peixes, Sollux Captor/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 5
Kudos: 55
Collections: Homestuck Polyswap 2020 - Derse





	Five of Pentacles, Reversed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SleepingDragons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepingDragons/gifts).



Karkat

The vibrant light of the green moon washes across the floor of your respiteblock, illuminating a jumble of books on coding, scattered dvds, and various devices. The light falls upon the open screen of your grubtop like a condemnation, as the insistent flashing of a symbol in a color that’s far too high on the spectrum for a mutant like you pulses in time with your bloodpusher. 

Your name is Karkat Vantas, you are five sweeps old, and the wavy symbol in seadweller-violet matches one of the ones on your wrist. 

Troll Serendipity explains the concept of soulmates as a set of symbols that appear upon the wrist of a troll. Trolls will have four or five symbols (five, if they’re destined to be the middle leaf in an ashen situation, as your friend Kanaya is). The symbol’s shape will correspond with the symbol of the troll you’re destined for. The color of the symbol, as well as the placement on the wrist, indicates which quadrant they’ll occupy. 

Your symbols, just like the rest of your fucked-up short life, aren’t like everyone else’s. Instead of one each of black, red, pink, and grey, neatly aligned in four quadrants, your four symbols are arranged in a circle. Each one is a smear of all four quadrant colors.

You wonder if there are others like you. If the trolls who belong to these symbols have the same problem, or if it’s just you destined to be defective in this, too. 

Only one way to find out, you think, swallowing hard. You make your way across your block to answer the message. 

  
  


* * *

Aradia

A bolt of lightning spears across the roiling sky, and the churning sea is illuminated briefly. The rain lashes everything except you. The force of your psionics keeps the water from touching you, just as it keeps you from falling to your death in the violent waves below. Your own lightning crackles in green-purple pulses across your fingertips and power sings in your blood. 

Your opponent, a dashing—if pompous—seadweller wearing a ridiculous violet cape and blue-striped scarf, and wielding an equally ridiculous oversized rifle, bares his fangs at you. The wind lashes at him, tugging his cape as he urges his lusus into a charge. 

You harden your psychic shields in preparation for a blast from that fuck-off large gun, but he catches you by surprise. Instead of firing the rifle, he leaps from the back of his skyhorse, directly at you. Your shields aren’t calibrated to withstand a physical attack, and before you can adjust, he’s upon you. His claws rend your anonymous outer shirt, and the force of his leap sends you both hurtling back towards the rainswept cliffs. 

The ground rushes up and you land hard on your back. The seadweller is straddling your waist, but you’ve wrenched away his rifle, throwing it out of bounds. His hands are cold around your neck, but you grab the fluttering ends of his absurd scarf and pull. 

He chokes the breath out of you, and you feel the icy claws of Death tug at your soul. You bare your fangs at him in a grin and use the nearness of your own demise to call upon the Dead. 

Spirits rise all around you, their ghostly howls pierce the wind. They converge on the seadweller, gaunt and ravening, generations of trolls murdered in this very spot and hungry for living blood. 

He looks around, wild-eyed and purple-faced, but doesn’t ease his grip. You’d admire that if your vision weren’t going black. 

“Time!” 

The strident voice of a tealblood referee cuts across the rushing in your ears. All at once, the seadweller releases his grip and you draw a ragged breath. You let the ghosts sink back below the ground. 

“Tie,” the referee pronounces. 

The seadweller stands up and offers you his hand. A strangely gallant gesture, from someone who’d just done his best to murder you. If he notices the maroon of your symbol from the wreckage of your anonymity-preserving black overshirt, he doesn’t say anything. You take it anyway and he lifts you like you weigh nothing. 

You turn and strip off the plain black shirt that hides your caste symbol. When you return the tattered remains to the referee—who tells you that you will owe twenty credits for the damaged shirt—you find the seadweller staring at you. 

He shoves his long black sleeve up his arm and holds up his wrist. Your symbol, along with three others—the same three others that also mark yours—adorns the inside of his wrist in a smear of color. 

The tealblood looks from his carelessly exposed wrist, to you, and back to him. “Thirty credits,” she says to the seadweller, snapping her fingers at the highblooded troll who is one of your soulmates. 

Sollux is going to be pissed. 

* * *

Feferi

Eridan storms into his hive, just like he storms into every other aspect of his life (and yours). 

You look up from where you were using his husktop to message Karkat. Pity and hate churn in equal measure in your belly when you take in his disheveled appearance. 

“I found another one, Fef,” he says, flinging his cape over the back of a chair. 

You raise an eyebrow and say nothing. He scowls at the bowl of candied whale blubber next to your hand—the secret stash he thought he’d hidden from you. You flash him a fangy grin and pop another piece in your maw. 

When he doesn’t elaborate, you make a show of peering around him. “Whale? Where are they?” 

“I…” Eridan seems at a loss for words, for once. “She...ran away after the tourney.” 

“Ran away?”

“Wwwell. Flew away.” 

Now you raise both eyebrows and help yourself to another glob of whale blubber. “They’re supposed to run to you, not away,” you point out around your mouthful. 

Eridan flashes a snarl at you. He hates it when you talk with your mouth full, but you’re in the mood to prickle him tonight. You favor him with a blubbery grin and he seems to deflate. He crosses the block and you hold up the arm that’s not balancing his husktop on your lap and he curls against your side like an oversized purrbeast. 

“Which one was it?” you ask, after a long silence. 

Eridan gently grasps your naked wrist, turning it over. With his other finger he traces the symbol—a curl that drops into a vee before rising back up into an identical curl. 

That makes four. 

There’s only one left to be discovered now. 

As if by fate, or chance, or possibly even serendipity, a new friend request flashes at the corner of your Trollian window. 

The symbol isn’t the one you were expecting. Eridan tenses next to you. 

You accept the request and find a message written in mustard-yellow. 

“We need two talk” 

* * *

Sollux

Fuck. Fucking. Fuck. 

To borrow a phrase from KK, the fuckening has begun. 

You’d hoped you, AA, and KK would be able to scrape by, just the three of you. You’d never wanted one soulmate, let alone four. Let alone four that all seem to occupy every quadrant at once. That sort of quadrant-smearing is fine among lowbloods like yourselves, as long as you keep it quiet and don’t make a Thing about it. Maybe sometime in the future, you won’t have to keep your head down and hide away from every cold-blooded bulgehead with an axe to grind. 

But evidently both these assholes are fish. And you weren’t hatched yesterday, you know you’ve seen the two-curves-bisected-by-a-straight-line symbol too, in places too high for your kind, in a color that you don’t even want to think about. 

You had turned on KK when squiggly-parallel-lines messaged you back, the red-blue crackle of your psionics fizzing across his shaggy hair and nubby horns, snaking around his neck. 

Because he knew. 

He knew and he never said anything. He’d been messaging both finned douchebags for over two sweeps. 

Aradia had inserted herself between KK and your murderous rage, temporarily flipping the three of you ashen. 

“What the fuck was I supposed to tell you,” Karkat bristles. “when you go around plotting the warmblood revolution with your buddies on your hyper-encrypted forums?” He’d gestured at the husktop. “Oh, by the way one of our soulmates just so happens to be the Heiress? And the other is the descendant of Orphaner Dualscar himself? Sur-fucking-prise!” 

“A little warning might’ve been nice,” you had ground out. 

“It’s done,” Aradia said. “He didn’t betray our ideals, he only wanted to get to know them better.” 

“Tell that to him! He’s been…” you’d groped uselessly for a word, “in cahoots with them!” 

It had come out ‘cahooths’ because when you’re that angry, you lose all hard-won control over your wayward sibilants.

But you’d released KK all the same. 

Now, the three of you are standing in the shadow of a massive tree, after arranging a meeting in a neutral place everyone could agree on.

Both moons are full tonight, blazing green-pink across midblood lawnrings. At the very end of the lane, two figures appear like an omen, as if they’d coalesced out of the shadows.

The horribly familiar curving shape of the shorter figure’s horns sends a thrill of apprehension down your spinal column, but you straighten your back, anyway. 

KK and AA grasp your hands, and all of you take a step out into the moonlight, towards your destiny.

* * *

Eridan

It’s been not even half a perigee since you and Fef met the rest of your mutual soulmates.

Already, each of them has sent you into a pitch black rage, left you shaken and gasping as your bloodpusher burned flush in your thorax, and melted wondrously soft with pale pity. 

Sol and Fef plot the revolution, while you spar with Kar and Ara. In a few minutes, or maybe an hour, Kar will take Sol’s place by Fef, and Sol will fight you. Maybe the fight will end with you pinning him to the floor and him letting you. Or perhaps, you’ll feel the glorious thrill of his psionics as he binds your body to the ceiling with nothing but his mind. 

Maybe Ara will kiss you senseless, with a generous amount of fang, just as you like it. Or maybe Kar will want to wrap himself around you, pale as a cloud across the pink moon, while he hisses pitch insults at Sol. 

Every night is a new adventure, and every day brings all your plans closer to fruition. 

The five of you have been in every quadrant and every configuration possible, and yet there’s still more to learn about each other. Even Fef, whom you have known since you were both barely-hatched wrigglers, has facets brought out by the others that she’d hidden from you. 

You can’t even be mad about it. 

The marbled soulmarks on your wrist never did settle into any particular quadrant, but you can’t be mad about that, either. Not when every night brings something new. 

The burning sun sails toward its zenith outside your shared seaside hive, but you’ve drawn the curtains closed against the burning light. The day is getting late, and sparring, scheming, and sloppy makeouts can wait until evening. 

The recuperacoon had been a special order and cost a fair amount of credits—chump change for an Heiress—but it’s more than large enough for five. 

You all pile in: Kar takes his favorite spot, right in the middle, and today Fef and Sol climb in on either side of him. Ara pulls your face down to hers, kissing you soundly and pinching your glutes before slipping into the sopor next to Fef. 

You slide in next to Sol, his body warm and inviting, despite being all long limbs and sharp edges. Kar reaches over and clasps your hand as you wedge yourself behind Sol. The sopor closes in like a comforting embrace around you, and you drift off to sleep, secure in the knowledge that whatever the future might bring, Serendipity brought you all together for a reason. 


End file.
